“Oh! Gimme!”
Millie holds out her hands, and I pass her the container.
Just then, I notice Malcolm coming through the door, his hand looped under Apollo’s collar. “Look who I found at the downstairs door.”
“Oh, shoot!” Millie says. “I left your door open.”
Apollo is Evan’s Great Dane. “Thanks,” I say to Mal. “He would have killed me. Is Ryan with you?”
“No, he had to work. Damn, you beat me,” he says when he sees Bailey.
She snickers. “Came straight from work.”
“If I show up without clam chowder, I won’t have a boyfriend anymore.”
“Sounds like you need to step up your game,” Bailey says.
I grab the clam chowder she’s trying to hide and hand it over to Malcolm. “I have some chili for you guys, too.”
“Awesome. Hey, Mills.”
Millie throws herself at Malcolm, greeting him with a hug. Heoofsbut accepts her exuberance in stride. I’m a little disappointed not to see Ryan. He lived with me for nearly a year before moving out to live with Malcolm. We weren’t close, but now that he’s with Mal, he and I have gotten to kind of be friends. I’ll need all these people if I’m going to make the fresh start my therapist is insisting I make.
It all starts with this freezer clean out and a blind date tonight.
Dating was my therapist’s idea, which Bailey seconded. They’ve been trying to talk me into doing something like this for months. If it weren’t for my total wreck of a weekend two weeks ago, I might have kept putting it off, but it turns out rock bottom is a real place, and it does, in fact, wake a person the fuck up.
All I know is I can’t sit around the apartment and do nothing between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. My brain would never allow it. Dating, however, might be pushing it. I bottle a lot of shit up during the workweek. Middle management means I take it from both ends five days out of seven. Everybody’s bitching while I just want to sit quietly and code. Being a senior coder at Polytech means I have both a team to manage, and someone to answer to for our work.
Like, I get my own office, but I’m rarely left alone inside it. While I prefer to communicate via email, most of my team likes to get things off their chests in person.
However, the way I’ve been coping with my own stress for as long as I can remember—getting high with my toxic friend group and fucking random men all weekend––has left me exhausted, wound even tighter than normal, and two weeks ago, in the emergency room.
“Lose the crew,” my therapist said because he refuses to call that particular group of people my friends, and he has a strong point about that. But for someone like me who struggles socially, those five people—however unsafe they’ve become—were my original comfort zone. But no amount of “they get me” swayed Gray, because apparently he gets me, too. Or so he says. I am honest with him, though. I learned a long time ago that our sessions are useless if I lie all the time, which, admittedly is what I used to do.
However, staying silent or only giving him the glossy edges while leaving out the dirty details left me stagnant. Still, it wasn’t until recently that I truly opened up and told him what I’ve actually been dealing with. Drugs. Sex. A seemingly unbreakable cycle.
In my defense, I’ve tried to create something healthier with the people here now. I throw dinner parties about once a month for Bailey, Malcolm, Ryan and some of their other friends. My new roommate Evan and I talk a lot more than Ryan and I ever did—and that’s mostly because Millie drives him nuts, and she spends a decent amount of time here.
I’ll probably never get a chance to tell him this, but Evan’s got a lot to do with me wanting to be better. His easy smiles and quiet confidence got me thinking that he’s the kind of friend I should have, if not the kind of man I should be. Ifheknew what I was like on the weekends, he probably would have moved out months ago.
Gray has asked why I never considered dating him, and the answer to that is simple: Ryan. I had a huge crush on my former roommate, and all that did was make me feel awkward and broken when he wound up with Malcolm. Am I attracted to Evan? Of course. He’s attractive. But he’s off limits. He’s a good roommate, I like his dog, and I’m not about to fuck up our living situation, especially when so many other parts of my life are in flux. I need the one stable thing.
Because I’m not superhuman, and my therapist isn’t a sadist who wants me to go cold turkey, he referred me to a psychiatrist to start medicating my anxiety, impulsivity, and cravings once I signed a pledge saying I’d stop doing drugs and drinking hard liquor. It was all very informal, and I’m not technically an addict. I’m more of a substance abuser. A binge user.
He and I talked about rehab–or he did, I mostly shook my head. In the end, we decided to try a medication and therapyapproach first. I’m bumping up my sessions with him to twice a week for now, and I’ve started an SSRI for underlying anxiety, another med for ADHD, and an opioid antagonist called naltrexone to take when I’m in high-risk situations. I’ve been taking it every day for a week, and I haven’t even thought about alcohol or drugs. I have a whole note in my phone that’s a letter to the company that made it to tell them how amazing I think it is in case I ever want to give them my compliments.
It's done nothing to curb my sex drive, however, so I’m saving the letter. Fingers crossed this date goes well tonight. With my mind on that and Bailey’s attention on Malcolm, Millie gets a phone call and rushes out, claiming it’s work. She takes the one container of vegetarian lasagna with her.
Bailey visibly relaxes when she leaves. “I don’t know how you guys stand her.”
Malcolm laughs. “You don’t think she’s even a little cute?”
“Are you sure you’re gay?” Bailey asks him. “Do I need to card you?”
“I didn’t sayIwas attracted to her.”
“I don’t do manic pixie dream girls,” Bailey says.
